Are There Problems with the Boeing 737Max? 2nd Deadly Crash Raises New Questions
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"In that case, investigations by the Indonesian and American aviation authorities determined that the Lion Air plane’s abrupt nose dive might have been caused by updated Boeing software that was meant to prevent a stall but that can send the plane into a fatal descent if the altitude and angle information being fed into the computer system is incorrect.
The change in the flight control system, which can override manual motions in the Max model, was not explained to pilots, according to some pilots’ unions."
Another unfair calculation: 40% of the Space Shuttle have been lost in unsurvivable accidents.
It's better to compare the number of accident divided by the number of flight. For the Space Shuttle, it's 2/135 = 1.4% of the flights. For the manned Soyuz, it's 2/165 = 1.2% of the flight (but both are in very old models).
This is what immediately struck me as well. Boeing has delivered 354 aircraft, 2 of which have gone down with all on board in the last 12 months. It's looking like they have a Comet on their hands.
Assuming they where 1 year in service and doing 1 flight per day, it's more like 0.002% accidents to flights.
Thinking about a solution to make their QC more robust brings me back to an article from 11 days ago on fuzzing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19265377